2015-09-01

shorthand activity on Twitter

Once in a while I search Twitter to see if anyone is consistently posting tweets in shorthand. Haven’t found anyone doing that yet, much to my surprise, and there is very little tweeting about shorthand, although it’s difficult to be sure since the word “shorthand” has also become a slang term for any type of abbreviation or colloquialism. This broadening of the word makes searching difficult.

Teeline is by far the most tweeted shorthand system in the English-language twittersphere. Journalism students in the UK, essentially forced to learn shorthand as a job credential, usually opt for Teeline and often post a photo of their practice notes, as seen in tweets such as the following:

Although this is only one momentary sample of the twitterverse, anyone studying the current sociological relevance of pen stenography could continue this sampling for a couple of semesters and then write a paper about the results. It appears that handwritten shorthand is a matter of no interest to the vast majority of Twitter’s English-speaking users.